


you let me share your couch with you (i thank you for that)

by wolfchester



Category: Outer Banks (Netflix), Outer Banks (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, god i just want to give this boy ALL THE GOOD things in life, jj and kie have definitely kissed before that's for sure, jj deserves better 2k20, jj's life told in friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:53:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23768791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfchester/pseuds/wolfchester
Summary: jj maybank is a complicated person. and a complicated person ends up involved in complicated relationships.
Relationships: JJ/Everyone, JJ/Kiara, JJ/Kie, is it in a friendship way or a something more way?? you're the reader you decide
Comments: 23
Kudos: 222





	you let me share your couch with you (i thank you for that)

**Author's Note:**

> i am soft for this kid every day of the week. please accept my offering of a jj origin story told through the relationships he has in his life. i am EMO
> 
> title from: ‘lamb’ by brockhampton

* * *

_ this ol’ sky, if I die _

_ I hope I’m no random guy _

_ somewhere out there they will say, _

_ “he is mine, he is mine” _

* * *

JJ’s mom died in a car accident when he was seven. 

His memories of her have faded over the years, especially since JJ’s dad removed all photos of her from around the house only a few weeks after the funeral.

He does know she was blonde and blue-eyed, just like him; that she was warm and kind and didn’t deserve the end to life she’d had. She had grown up in a middle class family up on the north end of the island, a good girl through and through with no reason to be running around with a boy from the Cut, as JJ’s dad was. Back then, Luke Maybank hadn’t yet become the sour and violent man he was now. He’d loved JJ’s mom very much. They had dreams to get out of the Outer Banks and travel the world -- dreams which skidded to a halt when JJ’s mom got pregnant in their senior year of high school. She was kicked out of her parents’ home and came to live with Luke in the Cut. She never left.

His childhood wasn’t a bad one. Poor, but not that bad. They had their little house down by the water with a big backyard and a crusty rowboat that was sturdy enough to hold both JJ and his dad without tipping over. It wasn’t until Sheriff Peterkin came to their door late one night to solemnly say  _ there’s been an accident downtown, Luke, I’m so sorry _ that things started to go downhill.

Luke started drinking. A lot. Whiskey for breakfast, beer for lunch, vodka for dinner. He lost jobs because of it. Got in fights because of it. Beat JJ because of it.

_ Sometimes you look so much like her I can’t even look at you _ . JJ never knew why that was something that deserved a beating from his dad, but it was. By the age of eight he was praying to a god he didn’t believe in, asking for the colour of his eyes to turn to green instead of that cornflower blue, just so he wouldn’t look like his dead mom anymore. 

Then JJ grew up and started hitting back. He remembers the look on his dad’s face when he punched him for the first time at the age of fourteen. His skin stung like crazy, and he was pretty sure he broke his knuckles, but that horrified expression in his dad’s eyes hurt the most. Like all the terrible decisions Luke had made culminated at that moment when looking across at his son -- now the same height as him, sporting the same bruises on his knuckles as him -- and he was thinking  _ is this who I’ve forced my kid to become? _

Every time JJ hits back, he thinks about how he’s a step closer to growing up just like his shithead father. He doesn’t know how to stop.

He was nine years old when he became best friends with John B.

Their friendship was a quick, light, immediate thing that happened over the first two weeks of summer break after third grade. They spent those lazy days down at the docks, skimming rocks on the water and seeing who could catch the biggest fish -- almost always just pogies. Big John let JJ come over anytime he wanted and the two boys slept out under the stars in the Routledge’s back garden, tracking comets and satellites and waking up to dew-drenched sleeping bags in the early mornings. 

When they headed back to school in the fall, they were separated into different classes but still found time to wreak havoc on the playground at recess. JJ was always louder, fell off the monkey bars more, pelted sticks at the girls who passed by. John B always won at tag, cried a little when he skinned his knees, had the girls chasing after him instead of the other way around. 

John B was the first one to notice the marks on JJ’s neck, eye socket, cheek, ribs.  _ What happened? _ he’d ask, but JJ would always reply something like  _ I fell down the porch steps _ , or  _ I slipped when I was trying to tie up the boat _ , or  _ I tripped over a tree stump in the yard _ . John B soon learned to not bother to ask, not to hear the excuses, but instead to steal antiseptic gel from his dad’s fishing first aid kit and have it on hand with a ball of gauze for when JJ would come stumbling through his back door on muggy, mosquito-ridden nights with tears in his eyes. 

It was just the two of them for five summers following that one in third grade. John B and JJ grew up together, brothers from different homes, family not by blood but by choice. And they fought like brothers too, like the one time they had a crush on the same girl in eighth grade and it took a half-hearted fistfight in the parking lot of a McDonalds for them to decide the girl really wasn’t worth it.

Things between them felt like they’d never change. Then came freshman year, and high school, and Pope.

JJ never really intended on becoming friends with Pope. It just kind of...happened. One second John B was project partners with the kid in Biology, the next it was the three of them down by the docks trying to catch flounders with their bare hands. For a long time, JJ felt like Pope was John B’s friend, not his; that the boy was just circling the outside of the brothers-in-arms type of relationship John B and JJ had cultivated over so many years. He was a nice enough kid, although awkward for sure, but he also posed a threat to JJ’s status as ‘John B Routledge’s Best Friend’. 

It wasn’t until John B turned fifteen (older than JJ by two months and Pope by half a year) and started to pack on muscle earlier than the other two that JJ and Pope began to spend more time together outside of their JJ-Pope-John-B-bubble. John B started flaking on the two of them to sneak around with girls in the grade above while JJ and Pope were left to their own devices. Slightly awkward conversations while fishing down at the docks quickly morphed into weekend surf sessions, late nights chatting shit around a campfire at the cove, sneaking beers from JJ’s dad and drinking them on the beach at dusk.

Without him realising it, Pope -- sweeter, more sensitive, unbelievably driven, strange and smart -- had become his brother, too.

And then there’s Kie. 

Kiara was one of those girls he used to throw sticks at. She had been pretty when she was nine and grew ever prettier as she got older. Something about her -- that dark curly hair, olive skin, big smile, mischievous eyes -- was timelessly beautiful. But she’d never acted like a pretty girl. Kie had never seemed interested in making friends when they were all at elementary school together, instead preferring to feed the ducks on the football fields bits of her sandwich bread or to save earthworms from being crushed on hot concrete. JJ was a borderline-ADHD hyperactive kid who barely focused on anything for more than three seconds at a time, but even at nine, he’d taken notice of Kie.

She had become friends with the boys sometime during the summer after their freshman year when she’d run into them while they were all out surfing a storm break. Pope had almost drowned after being trapped underwater by a big swell with his leash tangled around his waist, and Kie had been the one to dive down and save him. Lying on the beach in the rain afterwards, all filled with the glorious feeling of being alive after barely scraping through, John B had invited her up to their spot at Rixon’s Cove for a smoke and a beer. 

He was distrusting of her at first. Kiara was a Kook in almost every sense of the word. She hadn’t been born into money, but her parents had worked so hard at The Wreck when she was a kid that when the Outer Banks had established itself as a popular destination for mainland tourons the Carrera’s restaurant was one of the most profitable businesses on the island. She moved away from the Cut, away from the school they had attended together as kids, and started high school at North Banks -- lovingly referred to by the boys as the Kook Academy. She had a big house filled with lots of nice shit and the money to be able to buy anything she wanted. The fact that she’d show up to hangouts at the docks wearing thrift-store cutoffs and faded bandanas only endeared her to the three boys. 

However, by the time they’d all gone back to school for sophomore year, Kie stopped showing up to the cove, to surf sessions, stopped replying to texts. She’d practically disappeared off the face of the earth. It looked like she’d forgotten about them.

Over the few months she was gone, JJ only saw her once. She was down at the beach on the south side of the island with Sarah fucking Cameron of all people, watching a nest of sea turtles from a distance. She’d looked happy, even though she wasn’t wearing her usual bandana and cutoffs but a flowy white linen dress with daisies in her hair. He’d thought about going down and saying hi (he missed her -- they all missed her) but thought the better of it, turning himself and his surfboard around to head back further down the beach. 

The three boys heard through the grapevine that there had been a party at the Cameron house where the cops had been called. And then -- magically, miraculously -- a few days later, Kie had appeared at Rixon’s Cove after school with a cooler of beer and an apologetic smile.

She never explained why she left or why she came back. John B and Pope forgave her for ditching them as soon as she’d offered them a beer (and also probably because she’d grown boobs over that year so far and it was hard to say no to a girl who looked like she did.)

JJ would also develop a crush on Kie, as was the way with teenage boys and pretty girls, although it took him a while to get over the sting of losing her to the Kooks. He held her ‘Kook Year’, as they’d dubbed it, against her -- even though it was only really a few months -- for almost the rest of sophomore year. On the night he turned sixteen, they had a rager down at the Boneyard with a ton of other friends from school. While sipping his fifth beer and watching Kie dance with John B and some girls from their high school down on the sand, he’d realised that the bitterness he’d been feeling towards her was really misplaced affection. 

She was compassionate and generous and fiery and fucking annoying at times, but colourful and wonderful all the same. And pretty. (She’d always been super fucking pretty.)

And so, with too much alcohol in his system, he’d pulled her aside later that night and shouted over the sound of the music,  _ I like you! _ And she’d looked at him like he was crazy, but he’d leant down anyway to press his lips to hers. She’d kissed him back for half a second before pulling away and whispering  _ what the fuck are you doing? _ like he’d just ran over a cat with his car instead of merely confessing his feelings.  _ You shouldn’t go around kissing people like that _ , she’d said, staring at him with a confused look in her eyes that he hadn’t ever seen before (because Kie was always sure of herself,  _ always _ ), and so because he was a drunk teenage boy with half a brain he’d thrown his hands up in the air, flashed her a cheeky grin and replied,  _ relax, Kie, it was a joke! _

She was a good friend because she never mentioned it to other boys, and never brought it up with JJ ever again. 

There were other girls after that disastrous night -- girls from school, girls from the mainland, girls who lived in mansions in Figure Eight -- but there were still none like Kie. Never anyone like Kie.

They bought the boat off of Pope’s uncle at the beginning of junior year.

JJ was the one who came up with the name for their ratty little boat and its ratty little crew.  _ We’re like pogies, you know? _ he’d said round the fire at John B’s one night after too many beers.  _ We’re those annoying little fish that no one wants to catch. The ones the Kooks are always trying to get rid of. We’re fuckin’ Pogue’s, man! _ And John B had smiled and said,  _ The Pogue has a good ring to it. _ And Kie had said,  _ I’ll get the paint. _ And Pope had grumbled,  _ I don’t really like being compared to a useless bait fish, but okay. _

They learnt how to braid friendship bracelets on board the Pogue, Kie teaching them how to make them on their own after they kept losing the ones she’d gifted. What started as something fun to do became their  _ thing _ . They braided bracelets for special occasions -- birthdays, Christmas -- and sometimes for stupid things like surviving a storm surf session or managing to finally catch a fish over seven inches long, until each of them had stacks of bracelets covering their wrists.

Too many mornings, afternoons, nights were gloriously wasted on that boat with those people, drinking cheap stolen beer, smoking poorly-rolled joints, and going fishing but only catching fucking pogies. It’s the place they’d all turn to when they needed a break from school -- if they could convince Pope to ditch school with the three of them for an afternoon, of course. Even in winter they’d still go out on The Pogue, packing beanies, sleeping bags and blankets for a Saturday night under the stars. 

The three of them make him feel warm, and seen, and loved. He loves them back, all in wildly different, wildly complicated ways.

He loves John B because they’ve shared so much of their growing up years that even if someone tried to push them apart, they’d each be so full of the other’s memories, experiences, feelings, that they’d never truly be separate. He loves John B because he doesn’t know how not to.

He loves Pope because he chose to. They’re such different personalities that there are probably multiple universes where they never met, never crossed paths, never became friends. The two of them had to work on understanding one another. Even then, it’s still easy, and JJ’s fucking glad he’s living in the universe where he gets to love Pope in the way that he does.

He loves Kie simply because she’s Kie. Because he’s been looking at her since he was nine and he’s never been able to look away, not now, not ever. She’s the only girl who’s been able to get under his skin and make her home there, tucked under his ribcage, next to his heart. He doesn’t quite understand the meaning and the extent to the feelings he has for her. He only knows this one truth: he loves her. That’s that.

He’d die for them ten, forty, one hundred times over. Even when they brush him off, say  _ it’s just JJ being JJ _ , stop noticing the gashes on his lip or the bruises on his side, forget to call and say they’ll be late. He loves them and will love them forever. They’re family. 

He gets a dog for his seventeenth birthday. Kie had found it abandoned on the side of the road near the rubbish dump downtown. His name is Fisher, and he’s a yellow lab with half a missing ear who barks too much, hates walking on a leash, sleeps in JJ’s bed, joins the crew on fishing trips out on the marsh and will eat anything that tastes remotely like food.

And it’s the easiest relationship JJ’s ever had.

**Author's Note:**

> look, when rudy and chase say jj needs a dog, i take that as a sign. man needs a best friend to love my dudes
> 
> come follow me on tumblr @jjmaybank and scream about how much you love that lil son of a bitch


End file.
